CRITICAL MASS : Whoever Bob Dylan is, he’s earned his place
Posted on Tuesday, August 29, 2006
David Geffen once said he never knew anybody more interested in money than Bob Dylan.
I don’t know how he meant that — as a slur or as a comment on how we all are interested in money, or maybe as just an interesting observation about the mysterious stranger who has been slouching in the corner of the national saloon / salon for more than 40 years now: It’s not all oracular mumbles and futile looks with him, you know. He’s got a bankbook in his pocket and a lot of real estate out West. Though he always wears that battered felt hat, he’s probably a millionaire who could sell you and me.
My own belief is that 65-year-old Dylan is an all-right guy, probably less the dusty mystic than the old blackand-white posters make him seem. No doubt he’s aware of how some people see him, but he figures he can’t help that, and nobody has the right to be understood anyway. He came around at the right time, after Elvis and Jackie Robinson broke the color line, before the record companies figured out the business, that they make lots more money selling music to little kids and followers of fashion than they ever could to people who need it like they need bread.
I don’t try to figure Dylan out, not anymore — I don’t mess with him and he leaves me alone, except sometimes when I really need to hear “Every Grain of Sand” or “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” or Blood on the Tracks from beginning to end. It’s not often that I need that, but sometimes I do, and so I’m grateful to Dr. Dylan like some people are grateful to Jonas Salk.
Dylan has a new album out today, a no-doubt swanky little number called Modern Times. I haven’t heard much of it, only enough to know the title is halfironic because there’s nothing modern about Dylan’s sound these days — at least not if by “modern” you mean “upto-date” and “taking advantage of the latest advances in technology.”
Dylan may care about money, but he doesn’t need it that bad, he’s not going to squeeze himself into a white silk catsuit and ProTool that bovine squall into a rough approximation of chi-chi Hollywood pitch.
No, Dylan’s 44 th album is a lot like his 43 rd and his 42 nd, those late-career masterworks Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. Sonically it’s all guitars and keyboards, voices and harmonicas. It’s slap bass and brushed drums and road-worn, hammered out by a touring band. It’s 10 new Dylan songs.
(You remember when Dylan released his last album ? Sept. 11, 2001. )
I can’t say I’m surprised that Rolling Stone — which hasn’t felt like an honest broker in 30 years — gave it five stars in its review. Everybody loves Dylan now even if they don’t like the way he sings, because they understand what he represents: a kind of alternative America. If you’re of a certain age, maybe Bob Dylan is who you’d have turned out to be if you’d had the courage of your convictions and some genuine talent and inspiration. Maybe he really was our Yeats and not some poesy-spouting pop star who couldn’t quite be Elvis so settled for Sal Mineo. Maybe he wasn’t just “good with words, and at keeping things vague,” maybe the chapbook lyrics tore through him like a Teflon-coated slug. You look down and see the hole in your gut and wonder, “What was that all about ?”
You credit him as one of those American products, not crazy like Elvis, but self-invented and sly. He was a changeling, but now he has settled into a piano man, a working musician on a neverending tour of Double-A venues. He has become a jazzhead, one of those cats who catches the noise and turns it, tweaks it, who shimmies up a microtone and snowplows down a glissando. To catch Dylan you’ve got to go where he is, see him onstage in his blocked hat and suit of lights, surrounded by his lucky merry band. Just don’t expect to recognize “Like a Rolling Stone” when they start to play it, because now they start it in the middle and work out toward the ends.
What you’ve got in your hand, that mirror disk, that’s not Dylan. He’ll tell you so himself, it doesn’t sound like him, it’s trash, it’s compressed and shrunk down like some unfortunate missionary’s head. It’s not a performance, it’s a ghoulish key chain fob. You might love the record, but the Columbia recording artist will tell you you’re wrong to — it sounded 10 times better in the studio, he said.
All those superstitious aboriginals were wrong — you can’t trap a man’s soul in a photograph or on a length of tape and certainly not in the either / or matrix of digital code. Maybe it’s better, closer to the bone, if it’s carved out of wax and pulled out by a needle that shaves away more of the record every time it’s played. Robert Johnson was spookier before they mastered out the pops and hisses, when his voice was a thin and aching thing that could have come from nothing but a ghost.
It’s not always like that, it can’t be. Dylan’s smart, but he’s a magician, not a superhero. His job is tricking us into suspending our disbelief, getting us to take his salted fables for the truth. He can evoke W. C. Handy — “I’m going where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog...” — and turn the phrase to his own, obscurely subversive purposes — “... to escape these demagogues.”
Well, alright mama. Anyway you do.
Dylan might care too much for money (which after all, can’t buy him love ), but you look at the man’s career and even if you don’t credit him with making rock ’n’ roll a legitimate adult endeavor (or you don’t think that’s a good thing ), you have to admit that Dylan has transcended mere rock star celebrity. He’s a great American, like Emerson or Mark Twain. While he may have started out wanting to be Bobby Vee, he has wound up as a kind of American Picasso — a fine artist with highbrow pretensions, one who employs his own celebrity in the art-making process. Dylan would most likely deny this — he has, at various times in the past, assured us he is nothing more than a “song and dance man,” a comment that echoes Huddie Ledbetter’s protestation that he was but a “songster.” Whether you admire his music or not, it’s hard to agree with this self-assessment, almost as hard as it is to believe that Dylan himself believes it. Dylan understands how American, how important, he has become. His poses of late — especially since the release of his back-tothe-roots folk-blues album Good as I’ve Been to You in 1992 — have been increasingly humble, while his work has become undeniably major, an American moan crammed with meaning and
nuance.
Every real artist is a freak, and the more the artist pretends to be just like everybody else the more freakish he becomes. A lot of Dylan fans are fond of saying we have to let Dylan be Dylan, to accept the rash and experimental missteps like Tarantula and “Lenny Bruce,” that the only way for an artist to thrive, to get the ore out, is to dig up a lot of dumb rocks.
Dylan’s attitude toward his acolytes — and you can go all the way back to Don’t Look Back to see evidence of this — has always been complicated. He doesn’t like the Kool-Aid drinkers, those who would accept him as their intellectual mascot. Those who would call him Christ would turn around and call him Judas. Only nobody calls him Judas anymore; about the worst he gets is the bewildered shrugs of the legions who don’t get it, the patronizing back pats from those who’d take him for the “grand old man” of American pop.
You don’t have to like his work — it’s a free country, after all — but you have to be bull-headed not to respect it. You don’t have to buy his new album, or the 800-track “digital box set” iTunes is offering for the (not bad ) price of $ 199. You don’t have to believe in Dylan if you don’t want to, you can write him off as a con man, a carny barker in a Nudie suit.
We all have our superstitions. Ever lie awake on a still summer night in the country and hear a radio playing somewhere far off, so faint you can’t be sure you really hear it but so insistent you can almost tell whether it’s Jack Buck or Red Barber calling the ball game ? You ever feel something cold blade through you and know, somehow, somewhere, something has gone wrong for someone you care about ?
That’s the natural world, friend, full of inexplicable terrors and irreducible moments, and if you’re lucky you get to visit it. Guys like Dylan probably spend a lot of time there, in between trips to the bank, because sometimes they seem to catch a bit of it in their mouths. Their eyes flash and they spit and something is delivered. E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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